Monday, September 10, 2012

Former Cadet Webster Smith's Appellate Attorney Could Rise or Fall With President Obama

Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia,
has never run for public office. Many successful politicians have
started careers doing just what he has done. His aggressiveness as U.S. Attorney
for the District has ousted two city council members from city hall and
has turned up the heat on anyone within reach of the tainted money that
floated around Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s
successful mayoral campaign in 2010. Rudolf Giuliani was the U.S.
Attorney in New York. After he had successfully prosecuted a number of
high-profile Mafia cases and cases against Wall Street financiers, he
ran for Mayor of New York. He went on to serve two terms.
The
career of Attorney Machen could rise or fall with the fortunes of
President Obama. Some new presidents retain a batch of U.S. attorneys
but the coveted appointments typically are dictated by the winds of
national politics.
Voters who decide in November whether to re-elect President Obama or replace him with Republican challenger Mitt Romney also might determine the fate of the most powerful man in D.C. politics.

Former Coast Guard Cadet, Webster Smith, the first USCG cadet ever to be court-martialed.

Machen
is no stranger to high profile cases, and he has taken his share to the
U.S. Supreme Court. He represented former Coast Guard Academy cadet,
Webster Smith in his efforts to overturn his 2006 court-martial
conviction.(https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com)
The
Webster Smith Story is an American tragedy. It is not just the story
of a Black Coast Guard Academy cadet; it is the story of an American
family.
To his classmates, teachers, and coaches at the Coast
Guard Academy Webster Smith appeared to be a magnetic, charming and
gifted man, who had risen above his circumstances. Yet, in a moment, as
if in the twinkling of an eye, a swift series of events diminished his
popularity, vilified his name, and assailed his honor. His image was
converted by senior Coast Guard officers from a popular athlete and nice
guy to that of a sexual predator and public enemy number one at the
Coast Guard Academy.
The Webster Smith case was a litmus test for
justice in America. Every once in a while a case comes along that puts
our humanity as a people on trial. Everything that we profess to stand
for as Americans was on trial.
“The expectation is if Gov. Romney
becomes President Romney, he’ll replace all the U.S. attorneys. Because
that’s what presidents do,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor
and former prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Conversely,
analysts say, Mr. Machen, whom Mr. Obama tapped to lead the District’s
office in December 2009, is on the shortlist of federal prosecutors
qualified for a promotion to the upper echelons of the Justice
Department if the president wins a second term and reorganizes his top
law enforcement offices. Machen could even replace Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. who was sworn in as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States on February 3, 2009 by Vice President Joe Biden.
Mr.
Machen, a former partner at the WilmerHale law firm who played football
at Stanford University, leads the largest of the 93 U.S. attorney’s
offices in the nation and its territories. Because of the District’s
quasi-federal status, the office has an annual operating budget of about
$70 million and roughly 300 assistant attorneys equipped to handle both
federal crimes and local prosecutions that normally would fall to a
state- or county-level district attorney, office spokesman Matt Jones
said.
Mr. Jones, who declined to discuss potential post-election
changes, said more than half of the office’s assistant U.S. attorneys
are assigned to local prosecutions.
U.S. attorneys are given wide
latitude in the types of cases they prosecute, and the dual caseload
affords the top D.C. prosecutor a broad spectrum of cases to pursue.
During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. Attorney Roscoe C. Howard
Jr. said he wanted to “beef up” the District Court side of the
District’s office to attract higher-profile cases, including terrorism
cases and cases with international effect, in the wake of the attacks on
Sept. 11, 2001.
During the current administration, Mr. Machen’s
office has taken on a range of high-profile matters, such as the
unsuccessful prosecution of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens on charges
that he lied to Congress and the convictions of five D.C. men involved a
series of shootings in 2010 that killed five city youths, including
three teenagers on South Capitol Street.
Mr. Machen quickly made
local corruption a top priority after a trickle of scandal from city
hall tarnished the local government’s reputation and prompted oversight
hearings and sweeping reforms. The well-worn path from the John A.
Wilson Building to the U.S. District Courthouse may have stained city
politics, but Mr. Machen’s crew has rewritten the narrative on how
federal prosecutors handle local corruption in the nation’s capital.
“This
is not a city in which we’ve had effective and aggressive
public-corruption prosecutions in the past,” Mr. Butler said, citing
prosecutors’ inability to obtain verdicts on many of the charges that
resulted from “mayor for life” Marion Barry’s high-profile drug arrest
in 1990.
Although the top prosecutor sets the tone for the office,
analysts say, it is unlikely that a new president – a Republican in
this instance if Mr. Romney wins – would select a U.S. attorney who
wants to quash investigations into majority-Democratic city officials
and their associates. It is typically the line assistants – career
assistant attorneys who are not political appointees – who do the heavy
lifting in each investigation.
“There’s so much momentum from the
work being done at the line attorney level,” said Stephen Vladeck, a
professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. “That’s
why the politics are not always partisan in that respect. Is it worth
exerting yourself to stop the already moving boulder?”
Mr.
Machen’s office is eight for eight in securing guilty pleas from city
politicians and their associates in the city’s highest-profile
corruption cases since the start of the year. After a civil case by D.C.
Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, the prosecutor’s office charged
council member Harry Thomas Jr.,
Ward 5 Democrat, in January with stealing public funds intended for
youth sports programs. Thomas resigned his council seat and is serving a
three-year prison term.
Six months later, Mr. Machen’s office
took down council Chairman Kwame R. Brown on felony bank fraud and
misdemeanor campaign finance charges, but a long-running probe into
financial irregularities during the 2010 Gray campaign has yet to reach
its zenith.
While many D.C. politicians frequently took a
wait-and-see approach to their colleagues’ legal troubles, Mr. Machen
and FBI investigators lambasted the ousted leaders’ “sense of
entitlement.”

About Me

I am a thoroughly civilized, humane, cosmopolitan, polished, restrained, enjoyable, entertaining Info-maniac. I am a staunch exponent of individual dignity, freedom, equal access to legal services, and equal protection of the law. Here I hope to demonstrate my emotional restraint, humbleness of sentiment, psychological subtlety, lucid style, and simple language, without evading political reality or eternal truth. Daily I am excited that I have the right to create the beginning of a new self and to challenge old habits and attitudes I no longer choose to accept. I choose to relax in the present with my direction firmly in mind. I have an enormous capacity for creative and clever ideas and thoughts. It is phenomenal what I can do. I am capable of so much learning and absorbing a lot of information. My potential is a source of pleasant surprise for me.
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